Patricia Highsmith - The Tremor of Forgery

by Patricia Highsmith

  ‘You and Ina should marry,’ OWL said. ‘I know she loves you. But you must make peace with yourself first, Howard. Then with Ina. You think you can sweep it under the carpet, put it out of your sight—because you’re in Tunisia, maybe. But you’re not like that, Howard.’

  Now OWL was just like any one of his tapes. ‘Look here,’ Ingham said, getting up. ‘You seem to be accusing me of having hit that fellow that night. Maybe killed him. So why don’t you just say it?’

  OWL nodded, with his second variety of smile, gentle, thoughtful, alert. ‘All right, I’ll say it. I think you hit him with something or threw something—could’ve been a chair, but it sounded metallic the French said, like a typewriter, for instance—and I think the man died or died later from it. I think you’re ashamed to admit it. But you know something?’

  Ingham let him pause dramatically, for as long as he wished.

  ^You’re not going to be happy until you make a clean breast of it. Ina’s not going to be happy either. No wonder she’s troubled! She may be a sophisticated New Yorker, like you, but there’s no escaping the laws of God, who rules our being. One doesn’t have to be a regular church-goer to know that!’

  Ingham was silent. He was a little doped by the words, perhaps.

  ‘And one more thing.’ said OWL, drifting towards the closed house door, drifting back. “The problem is yours. Within you. The police need never be involved. That’s what makes this case so different from most such—accidents. The problem is really yours—and Ina’s.’

  And not yours, Ingham thought. It’s quite true the problem is my own, if there—’

  ‘Oh, you admit —’

  ‘—if there were any problem. So I wish, Francis, for my sake or for Ina’s sake, you wouldn’t keep on at me like this.’ He spoke with careful mildness. ‘I’d like to keep our friendship. I can’t keep it, if it goes on like this.’

  ‘Well!’ OWL opened his hands innocently. ‘I don’t know why you say that, if I’m trying to do what I can to make you a happier man—a happier man with the girl who loves you, matter of fact! Ha-ha!’

  Ingham suppressed his anger. Wasn’t it just as silly to get angry with his words now as to get angry with his tapes? Ingham warned himself not to take it all so personally. Yet here was OWL in person, and OWL’s words had been addressed to him, specifically. ‘I don’t think I’d better talk about it any longer,’ Ingham said, feeling that he was exerting more control than most people would have.

  ‘Aha. Well. That’s up to you and your conscience.’ Adams said, like the voice of wisdom.

  It was the last straw for Ingham. The bland, stupid superiority of it was more than he could excuse. He thumped his glass down with the last inch of Coke still in it. ‘Yes, I’ll be going, Francis. Thank you for the Coke.’

  And the way Adams let him out was also revolting. Holding the door, a slight bow, beaming on Ingham as if on a new convert-to-be whom he had just soused with propaganda, who would go home and let it sink in, and be a little more pregnable the next time. Ingham managed to turn around, smile and wave at Adams in the doorway, before he went to his car.

  Now Ingham wanted to talk to Jensen. But he thought it was silly to go running from one to the other. So at home, though he heard Jensen upstairs, Ingham kept to himself. He took off his trousers and flopped on his bed, and looked at the ceiling. Adams would never let up, he thought, but he wasn’t going to be for ever in Tunisia. He could leave tomorrow, matter of feet, with Ina, if he simply wished to. But alas, it would look like a ‘retreat’, he supposed, and he didn’t want to give OWL even this minor satisfaction. Ingham wiped the sweat from his forehead. Just before the time to see Ina, he would take a bucket shower. He could walk to the beach a couple of hundred yards away, and take a swim, but he didn’t want to.

  Ingham sat up with a thought. What had Ina asked Jensen this morning about Abdullah? She had seen Jensen just after her talk with OWL on the beach.

  ‘Hey, Anders I’ Ingham called

  ‘Yup?’

  ‘Want to come down for a stone?’

  ‘Two minutes.’ He sounded as if he were working.

  Ingham got the drinks ready, and when he came back into his larger room, Jensen was standing by the table, looking rather happy. ‘Had a good day?’

  ‘Pretty good. I want to work tonight.’

  He handed Jensen his drink. ‘I just had quite a session with OWL. I feel as if I’ve been in church.’

  ‘How so?’

  Ingham remembered he couldn’t tell Jensen about OWL’s weekly pro-God-and-America broadcasts. That was a pity, because it would have lent humour, and also force, to his story. ‘He’s trying to exert moral pressure on me to admit I conked Abdullah on the head. That doesn’t bother me so much as the fact he’s filling Ina full of it. He’s saying it’s got to be me who did it, because it was on my terrace, and only’—Ingham saw Jensen shaking his head with ennui—‘could have done something, and he says I’d better admit it to Ina and make peace with myself.’

  ‘Oh, merde and crap.’ Jensen said. ‘Has he nothing better to do with his time? So he gave you a sermon.’ Jensen leaned against the table, propped one bare foot on its toes, and laughed.

  ‘He did, invoking God, making my peace with Him and all that.—What did Ina ask you this morning, by the way?’

  ‘Aha.’ Jensen looked into space as if trying to remember. ‘She had just been speaking with OWL, it seems.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh, she asked me—yes—if I thought you hit the old bastard with something.’ Jensen looked suddenly sleepy. ‘I ought to take a nap before I work. This stone will help.’

  Ingham wanted to ask Jensen another question, but was ashamed to. He felt he was becoming as small-minded as OWL. ‘By the way, OWL and Ina both suggested I might have thrown my typewriter at Abdullah.’

  Jensen smiled. ‘Really? Where did you see OWL today?’

  ‘I went to his bungalow. After I’d taken Ina to the Reine. I wanted to ask him to stop bothering Ina with all this.’

  ‘You know what you should do, my friend, take her away. I personally would tell Mr Adams to stuff himself, but I think you are too polite.’

  ‘I did tell him to knock it off. What he’s really doing is turning her against me. I don’t say he means to, but- OWL keeps telling me my conscience bothers me. It doesn’t.’

  Jensen looked unperturbed. ‘Go with Ina somewhere for a week or so. That’s easy.—I got a package from home today. Let me show you.’ He went up the stairs.

  In a moment he was back with a carton. ‘Lots of cookies. And this.’ He removed the tinfoil from a foot-long gingerbread man, decorated with hat, jacket and buttons of yellow icing.

  Ingham stared at it, fascinated. It was different from American gingerbread men. This one made him think of icy Scandinavian Christmases, the smell of fir trees, and of flaxen-haired children singing. ‘That’s a work of art What’s the occasion?’

  ‘I had a birthday last week.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Ingham accepted one of the decorated cookies. Jensen said his mother or sister had made them.

  ‘And these,’ Jensen said, fishing at one side of the box. He pulled out a pair of sealskin slippers, the grey fur outside ornamented with blue and red embroidery. ‘Not very appropriate for Tunisia, are they?’

  Ingham suddenly had such a desire to see Jensen’s part of the world, he could not speak for a moment. He held the slippers in his hand and smelled them—a fresh animal smell, of new leather, and the faintest smell of spice from the cookies they had been packed with.

  The evening at La Goulette was neither a great success nor a failure. Ingham had told Ina that he had been to see OWL, because he wanted to tell her before OWL did, but even so—OWL was so quick these days—he was not sure Ina did not already know. She did not

  ‘I suppose you asked him—not to talk to me any more about the night of Abdullah,’ she said.

  ‘ Well—yes, I did. OWL knows as li
ttle about it as anybody else. Well, not anybody. The hotel boys know most’

  “You’ve talked with them?’

  “I thought I told you I tried to find out something from Mokta. He says he doesn’t know anything—about the yell and so forth.’ It occurred to Ingham that Jensen, speaking his passable Arabic, might learn something from Mokta or the others. The something Ingham was interested in was whether there had been a corpse.

  Ina was silent.

  ‘Would you like to go somewhere—like Djerba? I mean, stay at a hotel there? Both of us?’

  ‘But you say you’re working —’

  “That can wait. You have just a few days here.’ That brought up the question of whether he would leave with her, Ingham supposed. Nothing was in its right order any more. He had meant to ask her to marry him, to have that settled by now. That would have made their going on to Paris together, when she left, rather a matter of course. Should he talk to her tonight about getting married? Or was she taking that for granted? Ingham glanced around him: they were at an outdoor table of the restaurant where he had eaten the disastrous poisson-complet. Waiters with heavy trays yelled at pedlars and begging children to get out of their way. The light was so dim, they had hardly been able to see the menu.

  Ingham did not mention marriage that evening. But he did go back with her to her hotel. They had a nightcap in her room, and they spent a couple of hours together. It was almost as wonderful as the first time after she had arrived. Ingham felt a little more serious. Was that good? And he felt a little sad and depressed when he left.

  He kissed her as she lay in bed. ‘Tomorrow at nine-thirty.’ he said. ‘We’ll take a drive somewhere.’

  22

  EIGHT o’clock the next evening found Ingham where he had been the evening before, as far as Ina was concerned. She had enjoyed Sfax, had read about its eleventh-century mosque and the Roman mosaics in his Guide Bleu, but he sensed a reserve in her which took away some of his initiative, or enthusiasm. Ingham found a present for Joey, a blue leather case with loops inside to hold pencils or brushes. They had hired a rather heavy rowboat, and Ingham had rowed around a bit with her. They had gone swimming and lain in the sun.

  Ingham had wanted to ask her what kind of church she was going to in Brooklyn. It wouldn’t be Catholic, he was pretty sure. Her family was vaguely Protestant. But he could not get the question out. In Sfax, he had bought smoked fish, black olives and some good French wine, and he invited Ina to have dinner with him at home.

  Jensen had a drink with them, but declined to stay for dinner. By now, Ingham had more dinner plates and three knives and forks. His salt was still the coarse variety, bought in haste one day, and now it was in a saucer, damp. Ingham had two candles stuck in wine bottles on the table.

  He laughed. ‘Romantic candlelight, and it’s so damned hot we have to push them to the very edge of the table!’ He pinched one candle out, took a swallow of the good red wine, and said, ‘Ina, shall we go to Paris together?’

  ‘When?’ she asked, a little surprised.

  ‘Tomorrow. Or the next day, anyway. Spend the last part of your vacation there.—Darling, I want to marry you. I want to be with you. I don’t want you to go away from me even for a week.’

  Ina smiled. She was pleased, happy, Ingham was sure of that.

  ‘You know, we could be married in Paris. Surprise everyone when we get to New York.’

  ‘Didn’t you want to finish your book here?’

  ‘Oh, that! I’m almost finished. I know I keep saying that, but I’m always slow at the end of a book. It’s as if I didn’t want to end it. But I know the end. Dennison goes to prison for a bit, gets psychiatric treatment, and he’ll come out and do the same thing again.—That’s no problem.’ He got up and put his arm about her shoulder. ‘Would you marry me, darling? In Paris?’

  ‘Can I have a few minutes?’

  Ingham released her. ‘Of course.’ He was surprised and vaguely disappointed. He felt he had to fill in the silence. ‘You know—I deliberately never talked to you about John. I didn’t talk much, I hope. Because I didn’t think you wanted to. Isn’t that true?’

  1 suppose that’s true. I said it was a mistake, and a mistake it certainly was.’

  Ingham’s brain seemed to be turning somersaults, turning over facts, choosing none. He felt whatever he might say was of great importance, and he did not want to say the wrong thing. ‘Do you still love him—or something?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  Ingham shrugged, embarrassed, but she might not have seen the shrug, because she was looking down at the table.

  “Then what is it?—Or do you want to wait until tomorrow to talk?’

  ‘No, I don’t have to wait until tomorrow.’

  Ingham sat down in his place again.

  ‘I feel that you’ve changed,’ she said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘You’re—a little bit tough somehow. Like —’ She looked up towards Jensen’s rooms. ‘He seems to have had such an influence on you, and he’s—well, the next thing to a beatnik.’ She was not whispering, because they both knew Jensen had gone out.

  Ingham felt she was hedging from what she really wanted to say. ‘No, that he isn’t. He doesn’t come from that kind of family.’

  ‘Does that ever matter?’

  ‘My darling Ina, I haven’t known Anders very long, and I probably won’t ever see him again—after a few days.’

  ‘Will you tell me exactly what happened the night that Arab — Well, what did he do, try to come into your house? The bungalow?’

  Ingham looked away from her. He wiped his mouth with his napkin, which was a dish-towel. ‘I could kick Francis Adams from here to Connecticut,’ Ingham said. ‘Meddling bastard. Nothing else to do but yack.’

  Ina was saying nothing, watching him.

  A very inward anger made Ingham silent, too. The stupidity of something like this bothering them, after all the worse things they had weathered, the John Castlewood business, his moping over Lotte which had nearly finished him even after meeting Ina—all that overcome, and now this! And Ingham was now tired of statements, speeches. He said nothing. But he realized that what Ina had said was an ultimatum. It was as if she said, ‘Unless you tell me what happened, or that you killed him, if you did, I won’t marry you.’ Ingham smiled at the bizarreness of it. What did the Arab matter?

  He did not go up to her hotel room with her that night. And at home, he couldn’t sleep. He didn’t mind. In fact he got up and reheated the coffee. Jensen had come in around ten o’clock, said hello and good night to them, and had gone upstairs. His light was now off. It was just after one o’clock.

  Ingham lay on his bed. What if he told Ina the truth? She wouldn’t necessarily tell OWL. It would annoy Ingham, if she did. But hadn’t he decided, days ago, not ever to tell her? But if he didn’t tell her—and obviously she suspected already that he had killed the man—he would lose her, and that gave Ingham a feeling of terror. When he imagined himself without Ina, Ingham felt his morale gone, his ambition, even his self-respect somehow.

  He sat up, bothered by the fact that if he told her the truth, he would be in the position of having lied, looking her straight in the eye, for the past several days. He hadn’t quite succeeded with his lie, or she wouldn’t still be questioning him, but he had succeeded enough to make himself a coward, and dishonest. It was a dilemma. No matter how much Jensen said, ‘What does the bastard matter?’ the situation had come to matter quite a bit.

  Or was it the lateness of the hour? He was tired.

  Try to think of it objectively, he told himself. He imagined watching himself in the dark bungalow that night, being scared by the opening of his door (in fact he imagined somebody else, anybody else, being scared), having been annoyed and alarmed by a previous theft from the bungalow. Wouldn’t any man have picked something up and thrown it? And then he imagined the Arab alive, flesh and bones, a person known to other people, and morally and legally speaking as i
mportant as—President Kennedy. Ingham was ninety per cent sure he had killed the Arab. He had been trying to brush that aside, or minimise it by believing the Arab deserved it, or hadn’t been worth anything, but suppose he had killed a Negro or a white man in the same circumstances in the States, a man with a long record of housebreaking, for instance? Something would have happened to him. A short trial or hearing and an acquittal of a charge of manslaughter, perhaps, but not just nothing like here. He couldn’t expect to find, in America, a few convenient people to whisk the body away and not mention it.

  In spite of the shame of it, Ingham supposed he would have to tell Ina the truth. He would tell her his fear, also his hatred that night. He would not attempt to excuse himself for having lied. He imagined her shocked at first, but finally understanding why it had happened and excusing him, if in fact she would blame him at all. It seemed possible to Ingham that she wouldn’t blame him, and that she only wanted to be satisfied that she knew the true story.

  Ingham put on the light and lit a cigarette. He turned on his transistor and explored the dial for music or a human voice, and got a baritone American voice saying c… peace towards all The tone was soothing. ‘America is a land that has always extended the hand of friendship and good will to all peoples—of whatever colour or creed—the hand of help to any peoples who might need it—to ward off oppression—to help them to help themselves—win their battles against poverty….’ Ingham thought in disgust, All right, then give the land back to the Indians! What a splendid beginning, right at home! Not a piece of lousy desert you don’t want, but decent land with some value to it. Like Texas, for instance. (But no, my God, America had already taken Texas from the Mexicans!) Ohio, then. After all, the Indians had given the state its name, from the river there. ‘…what every man in the uniform of the American Army, Navy and Air Force knows—that with his privilege to fight for the United States of America goes a responsibility to uphold the sanctity of human justice, on whatever shores he may be….’ Ingham turned the thing off so viciously that the knob came off in his hand. He hurled it to the brick floor, where it bounced and disappeared somewhere. It wasn’t OWL, that steak-and-martini-filled employee of the Voice of America, or maybe the American Forces Network, but the words could have been OWL’s. Did anybody fall for it, Ingham wondered. Of course not. It was just a lot of bland tripe drifting past indifferent ears, which perhaps made some Americans in Europe chuckle a little, something that people endured until the next dance record. Yet the thing must have some influence or they wouldn’t keep on with it, therefore some people must be swallowing it. This was a profoundly disturbing thought to Ingham at two-twenty-five. He thought of OWL, just a mile away, dreaming up the same stuff and actually sending it, being paid for it—OWL wouldn’t lie about that. And paid by the Russians. Maybe OWL got as little as ten dollars a month for it. Ingham squirmed in his bed, and felt he was in a madhouse world, and that he might not be sane himself.